On pragmatic change: The borrowing of discourse functions

Abstract

As is well known, a typical and frequent effect of language contact and bilingualism is linguistic borrowing, the importation into one language of something from the other. Borrowing has been well documented at many linguistic levels, including phonological, lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic. (See Weinreich (1953), inter alia). However, what has not been appreciated is that borrowing can occur at the pragmatic level as well. In this paper, I shall present evidence for the existence of pragmatic borrowing, in particular, evidence that one language may borrow the discourse functions of a particular syntactic form from another language. More correctly, (i) a syntactic form S2 in L2 may be construed by speakers as ‘analogous’ to a syntactic form S1 in L1, and (ii) the discourse functions of S1 in L1 may then be borrowed into L2 and associated with S2. What speakers construe as ‘analogous’ syntactic forms turns out to be quite interesting and suggests that syntactic competence is both robust and sophisticated, as current syntactic theories claim. Furthermore, the situation that actually obtains after the borrowing may correlate with the logical relations between the discourse functions originally associated with S1 and S2. The evidence comes from Yiddish, where it is argued that pragmatic borrowing from Slavic has occurred, and from a nonstandard dialect of English, where it is argued that pragmatic borrowing from Yiddish has occurred.